This week's notable links
This is my regular digest of links and media I found notable over the last week. Did I miss something? Let me know!
How The Guardian raised a record amount of reader revenue in the U.S. | Nieman Journalism Lab
Roughly a third of revenue for the Guardian - a firmly British paper - now comes from US readers.
The Guardian is free for everyone to read online. There's the promise that paying readers see fewer calls to donate, but the real value proposition is the knowledge that you're supporting the journalism itself.
What this piece doesn't really discuss is the content of that journalism, and how it might appeal to US readers who want to go beyond an American lens. North American op-ed authors like Robert Reich and Naomi Klein say a lot about its lean - a left-wing positioning that it's hard to get from a mainstream US paper. #Media
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NYT Flash-based visualizations work again
"NYT is using the open source Ruffle as their Flash emulator. I hope other news outlets follow. It’s great to see my favorite visualizations working again."
A lovely way to keep interactive archives alive.
A little-known, but perhaps obvious, fact about newsrooms is that a lot of the interactive features you see embedded in articles and on news websites are just static webpages. Upgrading these can be painful if they've used out of date JS libraries and so on, to the extent that sometimes they just aren't ever changed.
I like the idea of using web components with a central newsroom-specific library to get around this. In this case, a newsroom could update individual components and have all static interactive pages that use them update at the same time, without necessarily having to rebuild the page itself. #Technology
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US to get first dedicated high-speed railway – built by Network Rail
I hadn't caught that the US's first high-speed railway is going to be built by Network Rail, which runs Britain's railway infrastructure.
The San Francisco to Los Angeles route will take under three hours; right now it takes nine hours and thirty minutes. I've done that journey in the past, including a bus connection in Bakersfield. This will be a huge improvement.
I like the idea that the rail expertise of other nations is being deployed to build infrastructure here. That's probably how it should be. Hopefully in the process, a whole new generation of infrastructure experts will be created domestically.
Fascinating all round. Bring on high speed rail nationwide. #Society
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My grandpa was a Nazi
"His definition of strength was power, influence, money and his network of important people. [...] I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made this very clear."
Powerful piece. We're at an inflection point, and this is a good reminder that we shouldn't trivialize the very real dangers we face. #Democracy
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The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams
"Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were taking large amounts of venture funding."
This is a key challenge with social networks that try and work with a different model: unless they're forced to be open (which, eg, Mastodon is), it's always possible for an acquirer to roll back their good intentions and do something else if it's profitable. It's also often possible for investors to remove the CEO in order to better serve a return to their fund.
The result is that these networks are hard to pay for. Decentralized networks have some advantage because they don't have to pay for infrastructure, but there's still a question about how the development team can be compensated (and therefore how to make development sustainable).
Lots to learn from in this case study. #Technology
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Search engine results are getting worse, research confirms
"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality."
SEO as an industry has made search engines much worse to use. People are essentially spamming the web, which undermines the signals search engines are supposed to use to determine relevancy and quality. The result is junk - which, in turn, inspires more junk in order for pages to rank higher than the junk that already exists. And so and so on until you get a junky race to the junky bottom.
And generative AI will make it all even worse. #Technology
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Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies
"Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to [Facebook]. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data."
In other words, there's a whole industry that makes a ton of revenue on providing information to Facebook. It's likely that each of these providers has many other downstream customers. The result is an extensive privately-run surveillance network. #Technology
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On being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends
"They just take it. Whatever they want." A poignant and infuriating reflection on generative AI, from the creator of Cat and Girl. #AI
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The incredible shrinking podcast industry
The entire podcast industry's numbers were juiced by a quirk of how Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps work. The actual number of listeners were far lower - as revealed when Apple Podcasts made a big update last September.
"For instance, The Daily and Dateline both publicly touted reaching over a billion total downloads. But representatives for these shows would not say if those numbers or other impressive daily or weekly download stats are still accurate."
Spoiler: they're not, and a lot of media companies are having to rapidly recalibrate how they report their numbers - many of whom could probably have been more openly honest about their popularity to begin with. #Media
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The Taliban’s curious love of SIM cards
"Global trade now means that even a pariah government like the Taliban can invest in and operate sophisticated surveillance systems, while imposing regressive policies that keep its population poor, hungry, and isolated. It’s a profound signal of how all governments will approach digital control in our era."
This last point is the most important, and illustrates why privacy and technology independence are vital. Our phones present a trade-off between convenience for us and surveillance opportunities for both networks and governments.
In Aghanistan the trade-off is between providing communications and information for refugees, and handing control over the source of information to the Taliban.
But, of course, there isn't much of an alternative - yet. It's worth considering what a truly independent network that is truly free from centralized control might look like. #Technology
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A Time to Break Silence (Declaration Against the Vietnam War)
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
[...] A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just."
My friend Roxann Stafford introduced me to the importance of this speech by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, a few years ago, and it's very much worth revisiting. #Democracy
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